AWS WAF 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee.

How Software Advice ensures transparency

Software Advice lists all providers across its website—not just those that pay us—so that users can make informed purchase decisions. Users can talk to our advisors for free to receive software recommendations matching their needs. Software providers pay us for sponsored profiles to reach users interested in their products.

How Software Advice verifies reviews

Software Advice carefully verified over 2 million reviews to bring you authentic software experiences from real users. Our human moderators verify that reviewers are real people and that reviews are authentic. They use leading tech to analyze text quality and to detect plagiarism and generative AI.

Independent research methodology

Researchers at Software Advice use a mix of verified reviews, independent research, and objective methodologies to bring you selection and ranking information you can trust. While we may earn a referral fee when you visit a provider through our links or talk to an advisor, this has no influence on our research or methodology.

On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews

Overview

AWS WAF

4.5

(4)

Pricing

Pricing available upon request

About AWS WAF

AWS WAF is a firewall solution that helps businesses streamline processes related to fraud prevention, bot control, web traffic filtering, managed rules creation, and more from within a unified platform. It allows team members to block and rate-limit pervasive bots, scanners, crawl downtime, and other common bots from consuming excess resources, causing downtimes, skewing metrics, and more.

AWS WAF enables employees to generate real-time metrics and set custom alarms to receive details of raw requests, such as URIs, IP addresses, referrers, and geo-locations.

AWS WAF Screenshots

AWS WAF Pricing and Plans

Starting price: Pricing available upon request

Free Trial

Free Version

AWS WAF Features

Popular features found in Firewall
Access Management
Content Filtering
Intrusion Prevention System
Network Monitoring
Next-Generation Firewall
Policy Management
More features of AWS WAF
Filtering
Firewalls
IP Filtering
Reporting/Analytics
SQL Injections
Threat Response
Vulnerability Scanning
Web-Application Security

AWS WAF User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.5

Ratings Breakdown

50%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

3.8

Value for money

3.8

Customer support

5.0

Functionality

4.3

Have you used AWS WAF and would like to share your experience with others?

Gianluigi M.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

11-50 employees

Used weekly for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed May 2022

Quite good basic Web Application Firewall in free version

We adopt WAF in front of our single ingress point, our ALB, through which all our requests pass. We deploy a lot of different web apps, including Wordpress sites, API custom apps and so on. With AWF we can setup some default rules which covers typical attacks and we sometime set custom rules based on specific application requirements. When rules become many, you have to pay to add more.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

Preset rules covers a lot of typical web app critical security issue, like SQL Injection and Wodpress attack. Monitoring is quite good. Set actions in the event of an attack is very simple to setup.

Cons:

You have a budget in "points" to spent for free. Using preset rules or set your own rules consumes "points" so you can set only a certain number of rules for free. Using advanced features requires a "pro" version which is very very expensive for us.

Reasons for choosing AWS WAF

We choose WAF because is really integrated with other AWS services and all our infrastructure is based on AWS.

Deep N.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

10000+ employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2023

AWS WAF: The Defender Our Web Apps Deserve

Its been super easy to create and manage all the security rules for all of my Web Applications in a single place using AWS WAF

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The best about AWS WAF is its pre-built defenses. This WAF acts as a shield for all my web apps and it filters out all malicious traffic and protects against common web attacks for example SQL injection, XSS, or bot attacks. It provides a variety of managed rule groups, including OWASP Top 10, Common Rules, and Bot Control which are super useful. Not only these pre-defined rules , I can create my custom rules to address specific needs for my web applications. And another very useful feature is I can easily integrate WAF with other AWS resources such as AWS Cloudfront, ALB ,Amazon API gateway etc .

Cons:

The pay as you go model for AWS WAF is little bit complex for a newbie as the price depends on many factors such as number of Web access control lists created,traffic volume,configuration etc. So you must have prior knowledge to deal with AWS WAF. Except this there is nothing much to dislike about AWS WAF.

Reasons for switching to AWS WAF

Our Contract ended with Akamai and We've found AWS WAF is bit less costly than Akamai

Rafael A.

Verified reviewer

Design

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed March 2022

Once you get past that the learning curve is unmatched.

Stop using third party tools. Being able to use all the other AWS tools, IP filtering, Shield and MAP.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The leap from other platforms has been slow but the speed with all the AWS tools is unmatched. Once you move from other services (Google and Azure) the environment is much better and robust. And stop using third party tools as everything is integrated within the AWS environment.

Cons:

The learning curve is complicated. And for more detailed projects I need a system administrator, because it is difficult. But of course the investment is well worth it.

Reasons for choosing AWS WAF

Having everything integrated in the same AWS environment. Scalability for larger projects AND the price.

Anmol D.

Verified reviewer

Computer & Network Security

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2023

AWS waf